Climbing with Sion (It’s Pronounced Shaun)

I love to climb, everyone knows that by now. The more it hurts the more I like it, I sometimes think that maybe I should stop wearing lycra and just get myself a full blown gimp suit for my weekend jaunts into the mountains, I may even remove my saddle and just go with the seatpost.

Most of the time I ride alone because people complain about the hills but there is one person ’round here who never moans and that is Sion. He may not have the build of a climber but mentally he is as light as I am physically. He often takes the long way home from work to take in some killer climbs, he is absolutely mad for it. He can also descend like a bag of rockets, he leaves me waaaaaaay back.

Yes, he smokes a fag before setting off to ‘open up his lungs’; yes, he sometimes grunts like a pig on the way up; and yes, on occasion he has had to get off and push but he never lets these things put him off the next ride, haha.

On Saturday he agreed to ride as long as we didn’t go up Heol Y Mynydd, I said ‘fine’ but didn’t even know where that road was, boy did his eyes light up when we got to the bottom of it, chuffed he was. We took in over 4000ft of climbing in just 34 miles, it was bang tidy.

Big shout out to Sion: a gentleman, a scholar, and an honorary climber!

(Click on the panorama to see it bigger, it’s a beaut!)

As always, you can check out the route on Strava and Ride With GPS.